Bringing Skepticism Home

With each shirt featuring a large “NO.” and then a followup inscription in smaller letters, mostly, the shirts ring true. I loved these: “No, Science is not a bad word.” “No, the Earth is not 6,000 years old.” No, psychic powers aren’t real.”

But glancing through the entire list, I felt occasional pings from my “I’m Not Sure I Entirely Agree” meter. I’m an atheist and a skeptic, which usually applies to religious and mystical matters, but I keep a little of my skepticism in reserve even for the people I normally agree with.

NO. Fracking is not the evil you think.

I haven’t paid attention to the subject as much as I’d like, but … I still worry that the quest for natural gas via fracking can easily have a negative impact on the purity of groundwater. I’m a little less glib than the shirt on the subject. Plus, once you contaminate groundwater, there really isn’t any way to clean it up, is there?

I was briefly involved in groundwater issues as an activist some years back, and the strange thing about groundwater is that it’s mostly unregulated. I can pump poison into the ground on my property, and if it sullies your drinking water, you first have to prove that it was me, and not some mysterious underground process, that polluted your water. And good luck with that. Oh, and even if I pay you for the damage, your water is still polluted.

Example (related more to water supply than water pollution, but the principle is the same): There was a golf course installed on a piece of rather marshy property a bit uphill of this ranch I worked at. To make the golf course less marshy, they dug drain channels and diverted the slow subsurface flow completely away from the future course. Downstream of that subsurface flow as we were, our groundwater supply vanished. The lush grazing meadow we kept for the horses, and long lines of willow hedge that bordered the ranch, all died the following summer. But there was no way to prove that the golf course builders were responsible. The grazing meadow – and the entire ranch – became a literal dustbowl, and the neat hedge turned into a row of unsightly dead sticks in less than a year. End result: Golf course owner happy, ranch owner screwed. Forever.

NO. Aspartame won’t hurt you.

I’ve used an underarm anti-perspirant for most of my adult life. A few years back, I noticed the skin of my pits was somewhat discolored, and the texture of the skin was … different. I had this sudden image of white mice used in cancer tests, with nicotine or some other chemical painted on them every day for years. It seemed to me that I was doing that same experiment on myself (just as cigarette smokers are repeating the cancer test on their own lungs). I stopped using the antiperspirant (I still use deodorant), and the skin discoloration gradually cleared up.

For the same reason, I steer clear of all artificial sweeteners. We’ve been dealing with sugars since forever, and have evolved to deal with them. The new stuff, not so much. (Besides which, some of the artificial sweeteners either have weird aftertastes or somehow FEEL weird in my mouth.)

I think a lot of this stuff, consumed by the general public, amounts to an extended corporate-funded experiment on unwitting participants. One in which I don’t have a great desire to take part.

Also, I have to ask: Why use fake sweeteners when we’ve already got sugar and honey? (To me it’s like buying someone a gift card – which can be used in only one place and costs more than the amount of the “gift.” Real money, on the other hand, can be spent anywhere, and comes with no surcharge. You just give it to them, and they spend it wherever they want.)

NO. Vitamins don’t help healthy people.

Yeah, but the phrase “healthy people” is a bit of a waffle. How many of us eat really good, nutritious food all the time? I’ve taken vitamins most of my life just as a form of insurance against my known diet of not-so-great stuff.

NO. Fast food will not kill you.

But it also won’t help you all that much, either, especially if you eat it all the time. I see fast food generally as fatty and vitamin-depleted.

I was diagnosed with an acid stomach problem a few years back and told by my doctor that I’d be taking Pepcid every day for the rest of my life. Without going into the details, I HAD TO take this medicine or suffer painful, even crippling, consequences.

When I stopped the fast food, caffeine and sugary stuff, and started eating a lot more vegetables and fruits, that acid problem went away in less than a week, and never came back. I totally stopped taking the acid blocker (which is another long-term science experiment I kinda didn’t want to do on myself).

NO. Mercury fillings won’t hurt you.

I had 7 or 8 mercury fillings that I had replaced with composite about 5 years ago. I can’t say I noticed any changes in my health or mental acuity. I had them taken out for one main reason. Mercury amalgam is supposedly safe when it’s in your mouth, but when it’s taken out, it’s suddenly classified as toxic waste. Yes, there’s a longer argument in that statement. But … toxic waste? Mercury? In my mouth? No, thanks.

Some large part of my view of the world, and especially corporate interests, is based on my work with draft horses. Even with the even temper and placid good will that draft horses are known for, they weigh a ton or more and are just damned strong. One giant hoof coming down on your foot and you’re crippled. One errant kick at a fly when you’re bent over fastening harness, and the brain inside your fragile little human skull is history.

Likewise, even with the best of good will, big corporations/organizations can hurt you without meaning to. As to government regulation? Anybody who’s ever worked in a place that has OSHA inspections knows what a joke they are. If people get injured on a jobsite, there might be some remediation, but if you’re the one injured, you’re still injured.

If some product injures you or your kids – and I suspect it’s happening all the time, but we’re mostly unable to even know it – money is never a replacement for health and life.

Besides which, mercury has an interest group, the American Dental Association. With the tobacco industry example in mind, I know that even if mercury was to become KNOWN to harm people, it would still be years before they stopped putting it in people’s mouths. And meanwhile, they would defend it viciously against claims of harm.

I could easily be wrong about this, and hopefully some of you are more knowledgeable about it than me. But until I have time to really look into it, my motto is “When in doubt, better safe than sorry.”

NO. Peak oil isn’t the end of the world.

Ahem. Yeah. Like there’s some other fuel source out there just ready to take over, and like still rocketing population isn’t going to fuck us even if we switch over.

Yes, we’ve got to get off oil. (We won’t do it, though. Not until we’re desperate, and beyond desperate. Hell, here in the U.S., we’ve got PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES saying there’s no such thing as global warming.)

But, first, oil isn’t just a fuel source. For just one example, think about the streets near your house, and the potholes that show up every winter. Paved roads begin to degrade almost immediately, and without constant maintenance will become impassible within, say, 10 years or so. What do they pave and patch them with? A petroleum product. What’s going to replace it when it becomes too expensive or too scarce to use? Darned if I know.

Second, I lived in a tiny town in the mountains, a town with a single access road from the main highway. Several times in the years I was there, that road got snowed under 6 to 10 feet of snow, for 3 or more days. One eye-opening side effect of the thing showed up at the big supermarket in town. On Day 3, these four departments were emptied out: Dairy, Bread, Meat, Produce. There was no meat, no bread, not so much as a stick of butter, not so much as a single potato. None.

The eye-opener was this: A store isn’t a place where food is. It’s more a sort of food river, a place where food flows through. Only fierce stocking efforts, involving late-working stock boys but also very much involving another river, a river of trucks, keeps it looking like a store.

And when the river stops flowing from the upstream side, it empties out on the downstream side … in exactly 3 days. My conclusion is a sort of grim epigram:

If the trucks can’t get through, the revolution starts on Day 4.

Yeah. And trucking will be hit big with higher fuel costs, but also, just as severely in the long term, with bad roads. Even if we find some new way to fuel autos and trucks, we’re still faced with this ticking bomb of how to repair the roads.

I’m hoping a bunch of bright boys somewhere out there have this all figured out. But if that conversation is taking place, I have yet to hear it.

Speaking of which:

NO. Ethanol is not a good fuel source.

Heh. Actually, this one I agreed with so much I wanted to shout it to the world. Bravo, Skeptoid!